Monday, February 17, 2014

UN anti-Vatican report 'payback' for pro-life work, critic says

A recent United Nations report criticizing the Catholic Church on sex
abuse and its moral teachings should be understood in the context of
efforts to diminish the Vatican’s pro-life influence at the U.N., a
scholar has said.
Anne Hendershott, a Franciscan University of Steubenville sociology
professor, said Feb. 10 in Crisis Magazine that the U.N. will likely
continue its abortion advocacy, efforts to expand contraception access,
and efforts to normalize homosexuality.

“The Catholic Church is one of the few remaining barriers to this
expansion,” she said. “There will be continued attacks and the Church
needs to prepare for them as the United Nations will continue to attempt
to diminish the authority of the Church by resurrecting old clergy
abuse cases and inflating statistics on past misdeeds by priests.”

She said the Holy See has been “the major barrier” to U.N. advocacy of
worldwide abortion and contraception distribution and there are efforts
to “diminish the influence of the Church on life issues.”

In a Feb. 5 report, the United Nations’ Committee on the Rights of the
Child claimed that the Vatican had “systematically” adopted policies
allowing priests to rape and molest children. The report said the Church
should open its files on previous cases of abuse. It criticized
Catholic teaching on abortion, contraception and homosexuality. The
report also advocated changes in Catholic doctrine on life and
sexuality.

Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, who heads the Holy See’s permanent observer
mission to the United Nations in Geneva, said that the report was in
some ways outdated and ignored recent efforts to prevent abuse. Vatican
spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the committee appeared to exceed
its boundaries and gave disproportional attention to organizations with
“well-known” anti-Catholic prejudices.

Hendershott, who has written extensively on the politics of abortion,
said it was likely that the report was “payback” for Catholic opposition
to abortion and contraception.

Citing Austin Ruse of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute,
she said the Catholic Church’s successful work to block a “right to
abortion” at the 1994 U.N. Population Fund Cairo conference has thwarted
the work of the Population Fund, the Norwegian government, and other
abortion advocates like Catholics for Choice.

The Population Fund works with governments to expand abortion and
contraception access. It has drawn significant support from wealthy
sources like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Catholics for Choice, a group backed by the Ford and Rockefeller
Foundations, in 1999 led an effort to remove the Holy See as a permanent
observer at the U.N. That effort drew significant resistance and had no
support from any U.N. member states, though the group has recently
re-launched the effort.

Hendershott suggested it is time for the Catholic Church and the
Catholic laity to “stand up to the bullying by the various committees of
the United Nations” and expose the U.N.’s “real agenda” of abortion and
contraception expansion while defending the Church as the “true
protector of children.”

“While the Church was unable to convince all countries – including the
United States – of the evils of abortion, the Vatican, as a sovereign
state, continues to play an important role at the negotiating table in
areas in which the Church has a stake in helping to ensure the right to
life and the dignity of the person,” she said.